It’s official: Control 2 is Control Resonant, a paranatural melee brawler with shapeshifting hittin' sticks

In different triumph for trademark paperwork diggers, weird fabrication action-RPG sequel Control 2 is successful information Control Resonsant, arsenic confirmed by an announcement and trailer astatine The Game Awards 2025. It’s retired successful 2026 and swaps Control’s telekinesis-aided shooting for melee thwacking. Said thwacking takes spot crossed a Manhattan that’s suffering from much than a dash of catastrophic world breakdown, arsenic teased - this clip intentionally by developers Remedy - successful Alan Wake 2 DLC The Lake House.

It's besides got a caller protagonist successful Dylan Faden, duplicate member to archetypal pb Jesse, who aft 7 years of moving the Federal Bureau of Control has vanished – conscionable arsenic the FBC’s locked-up menagerie of unnatural horrors has escaped into New York. Dylan, nether fastener and cardinal himself aft completing Brainwashed Baddie work successful the archetypal game, is thusly hired by the FBC’s shadowy Board to find their missing enforcement and possibly assistance cleanable up the messiness extracurricular if it’s not excessively overmuch trouble, thanks.

Judging by the trailer, Control Resonant’s combat is inactive of the fast-paced, dashing and levitating variety. Dylan’s warring style, however, appears wholly gun-free, alternatively revolving astir the Aberrant: a shimmering metallic barroom that tin alteration into assorted melee weapons. Be they duplicate swords, a chunky spear, oregon the astir physics-defyingly immense warhammer you’ll spot extracurricular of Elden Ring. It’s also, curiously, thing that Jesse herself appears to lamp Dylan with earlier skedaddling. Know the feeling, mate – my sister erstwhile threw a cricket stump astatine my head.

Remedy accidental that Control Resonant volition person a wider assortment of moves and powers to larn than successful the original, and that it’ll thin further into its RPG broadside by having you perpetrate to accomplishment builds with less opportunities to backtrack. As for who you’ll beryllium biffing, I spy immoderate acquainted crimson-skinned Hiss types from Control and FBC: Firebreak, though the large bads are "a caller menace that tin reshape the precise cloth of our reality." I similar the thought of going toe-to-magic-stick with a broader scope of otherworldly hostiles; glimpsing immoderate of the contained oddities wrong Control’s Oldest House made for some beardown worldbuilding and absorbing sidequests, but erstwhile unit broke out, it was usually conscionable against reddish blokes with guns.

I’m little definite of the setting, and of playing arsenic Dylan specifically. Manhattan does look affluent with opportunities to propulsion it isolated successful melodramatic ways, but past what we’ve seen truthful acold is mostly conscionable Inception high-rise kaleidoscoping, with small of the chiseled ocular individuality that the brutalist Oldest House provided. Dylan, meanwhile, spent astir of Control being mindfudged into snarling threats from a box, portion the likeably awkward Jesse went disconnected to person amusive masonry-throwing fights. Still, possibly Control Resonant tin beryllium a redemption arc for the Faden household fuckup.